Air New Zealand's New All Blacks Livery

PPG created this new All Blacks livery for Air New Zealand with green paint.

If you read carefully, this statement has probably left many of you with one or both of these thoughts:

1. The livery is not really "all black." Am I missing something?

2. How do you design a black aircraft with green paint?

So let's explain. New Zealand has a champion rugby team called the All Blacks. Air New Zealand is sponsoring the team through 2015, and therefore decided to outfit four of its aircraft to show that. The silver fern near the tail of the aircraft is a symbol of New Zealand.

As far as the second inquiry goes, the "green" part signifies the environmentally-friendly aspects of PPG Aerospace's pretreatment, primer and topcoats, which the airline chose to coat the aircraft. According to the paint supplier, the topcoats contain less VOCs, which reduce greenhouse gas emssions.

Aviation Painting Services in New Zealand painted the Eagle Airways Beechcraft 1900D aircraft seen here, and Boeing painted the 777 in Everett, Wash.

So, how much paint do you need to cover a Boeing 777-300ER? According to PPG, a lot! For this particular aircraft, technicians needed: 185 gallons of PPG's Desoprime primer and Desothane topcoat and and 12 gallons of DesoGel pretreatment. PPG says that it saved an estimated 100 pounds of chromates by using these "green" paints and primers compared to traditional ones.